Yesterday marked the beginning of the internet's hour of desperate need, and I hope that the exposure and message sent reaches its intended audience. The vote, and perhaps subsequent hearings and challenges, however, is just a formal codification of the shady dealings that are happening in regimes the world over to silence the voice of dissent. The same champions of this current legislation shut-down Wikileaks as revelations were unfolding furiously and with the same attitude (but not with the same gravity, yet) as the dictators that tried to stop the uprisings of the Arab Spring. Though it is not the only insidious facet of the bills revealed, one major complaint of websites is the expected burden of policing every link, every tangent of what they post and of what they host, with criminal consequences for non-compliance. Most websites, fearful of litigation, will just give up or become expatriates, though there is probably not much of a margin for escaping.
There is additionally the potential for oligopoly on the internet by a few media sources and, by extension, the chance to regulate the flow of misinformation.
The internet is just a series of tubes, but it is also a medium that is free and open and patched together by architects that do not suffer being bound by red-tape. It seems to me that for whatever reason, possibly thrashing out against loss of power or prestige, the US government or its minders have taken to a new strategy when it comes to getting their way: a convoluted, byzantine legal support structure that places a Sisyphean labour on the public at large, like this obligation to make sure all ones commentary is copacetic or the
reporting requirements of the US Internal Revenue Service imposed on foreign banks that would make them shun American clients (and investments) over the paperwork and administrative costs involved. Just as if the government were serious about generating tax revenue, they would make businesses pay their fair share, SOPA and PIPA will not be effective in curbing piracy and copyright violations by "foreign rogue sites." Maybe the Super Powers are expecting the rabble to do their patrolling, under threat of torture, or maybe these policies, which no one even
bothers reading in full, are hopelessly complex by design, wearying one into submission.
It was not as if the activistas and the internet community was too busy running a premature victory-lap on putting off the votes on SOPA and PIPA not to notice, the matter was simply not being covered by the media and could not compete for anyone's attention it until it signatures were already penned, and without much debate, protest or bother twenty-two EU member states along with Mexico and Japan chose, in authoritarian style, to join America's Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a treaty which contains many of the same entertainment-industry engineered provisions and much of the same language as SOPA and PIPA. The spirit of the law, at least as it is being portrayed to signatories that needed little convincing, has merit for commerce but endangers freedoms, and at odds with existing and enforced national policies, raises the spectre of censorship. Those few who were aware of this unilateral decision did voice their concerns: there were rallies on the streets of Poland and some representatives in Poland’s national donned Anonymous, Guy Fawkes masks in protests. 
That the people had no voice but will be the ones enforcing and working within the framework of the law is nearly as big of an affront as any of the bad policies it contains. The treaty will not come into effect until it is passed by the EU Parliament in June, and the parliamentarian formerly negotiating the treaty resigned his post in protest over the character of the treaty, the secretive lobby and that no regular citizens had any input. In related developments, another social-networking service has agreed, in order to continue operations internationally, to comply with redacting notices at government request. This is tragic news, especially for one of the facilitators and moderators of the revolutions of the Arab Spring to bow to oppression, but they had little choice. Perhaps, however, as bad as it is, all is not lost: approaching threats of censorship more systematically than has been done by others forced to comply, the blacked-out content will not just be elided but obviously censored and only within country, not to the world, and all redacted items and the take-down requests will be archived in a clearing-house that fights for freedom of expression. Faced with the unsavory task of unpublishing uprisings, no other service has gone so far to ensure the censors will be held to account. 
